Which is just my point. It's not that no means of recourse exists outside the contract code; it's that there exists no option between zero and global thermonuclear war. The broad range of subtleties that contract law has developed to answer complex situations, and the option to exercise judgment in those cases not yet captured by precedent, is completely absent in Ethereum, because the people who designed it saw no reason why any such thing should be needed.

Unfortunately, that they failed to see it doesn't mean it isn't so, and now every new conflict among blockchain participants is an exciting new opportunity to reinvent another piece of several hundred years' worth of too hastily discarded prior art.